The present invention relates to nanomembrane transducers and in particular to an audio transducer that may be applied directly to the eardrum.
Monitoring and characterizing human body conditions, such as perceptions of pain, pressure, fluid sensations and sound perceptions, is an important aspect in many neurotology diagnosis and treatment plans.
With respect to hearing, understanding average and peak sound levels that are sensed (e.g., noise dosimeter) may be helpful in many cases for monitoring risks to hearing or changes in hearing and/or treating the ear (e.g., amplification, noise cancellation). An ear drum supported transducer may objectively characterize symptoms to aid diagnosis and guide treatment. For example, tinnitus is the perception of sound in the absence of a corresponding external sound source and may result from a wide range of underlying causes.
Objective tinnitus occurs in cases in which an actual sound is produced within the body and is audible to the patient, though practically may not be audible to the clinician. Objective tinnitus may arise, for example, from muscle spasms that cause clicks or crackling around the middle ear, as in “myoclonic tinnitus.” Other forms of objective tinnitus include, for example, “pulsatile tinnitus” in which patients experience a sound that varies with some aspect of the vascular system (arterial or venous) and which may raise concern for a variety of vascular pathologies.
Subjective tinnitus, on the other hand, may arise from neural mechanisms in which a perceived sound has no corresponding external or internal mechanical source.
Even among experienced clinicians, given the non-specific nature of a broad range of auditory and vestibular symptoms, the absence of clinical instrumentation to objectively monitor and characterize symptoms represents a fundamental barrier to accurate diagnosis and improved treatment. In other cases, understanding audio conditions may be helpful in monitoring and/or treating other disorders of the head, neck and/or other parts of the body (e.g., pulse oximeter, sleep monitor, bioassay, electrical stimulation for otalgia or headache).
Clinic based tests of neurotological conditions have considerable limitations, including sensitivity, specificity and reliability, and presently offer limited and temporally constrained information about physiological and non-physiological function of the auditory and vestibular system in real word conditions. As a result, discrepancies between objective findings and subjective complaints are common. The inability to correlate objective measures of physiological states, including changes in environmental and internal conditions, with subjective symptoms in real world conditions limits advances in the characterization and management of a broad range of neurotological conditions.